Embed Notice

One thing about 80s and early 90s pre-internet counterculture that current internet counterculture misses pretty hard is the culture of publication and curation.

I don't know what's got me thinking about this so much this morning, but I am, so it's time to talk about it.

In the 80s and 90s, if you wanted other people to find something you had to put in some effort. You had to make a physical artifact, a mixtape or a zine or whatever, and you had to include all the information they'd need on that artifact, because there was no way to bootstrap discovery from nothing. All discovery was dependent on either a social layer or a publication layer or a social publication layer.